


Nevada 2: Tranpunk Boogaloo

by AB Silvera (Meenah_Fishes)



Category: Nevada - Fandom
Genre: Fan Sequel, Sci-Fi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-15 12:45:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5785810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meenah_Fishes/pseuds/AB%20Silvera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after the end? When you're a trans lady loser in ShitHole, USA, not much, until you transition, your world gets turned upside down, and you survive the apocalypse in the form of an alien invasion.</p><p>This is what happens when an author's friend threatens to write a sequel fan-fic because she selfishly believes she needed more closure.</p><p>(this is a parody sequel, in no way or form endorsed or supported by Imogen Binnie or Topside Press, and is just done as a bit of fun on my part)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Early Flattember, Jen H., Interstate 80

Star City, Nevada, is utter friggityfraggity bulshit.

As she switched gears and did other car piloting stuff, Jen H. said this under her breath. She’d just passed the turn for Star City, and she didn’t care. The road to Star City looked like it had seen better days. Nobody went to Star City anymore, anyway. In a way, Jen’s rage had been vindicated, and all it took was an apocalypse.

Every human being in existence now knew the name of Star City, Nevada. Not as a gold rush-era ghost town, but rather as the site of the first landing, and first victory, of the invading Alien legions. This was where humanity made its stand, and fell. Typical, Jen thought to herself. Star City was a place created with failure in mind.

But that wasn’t the reason nobody went to Star City anymore, after all, cities are useful even after they’ve been invaded and taken over by evil interstellar colonial powers. I mean, just ask New Ph’Klchtikkkk over in the east coast. No, the reason was because Star City was no longer a city, but a monument. Nobody lived there. Humans didn’t drive through it. The Perkrish flew by in their saucers sometimes, or brought little excursions. Little gray baldy Perkrish children, with their language that sounded to Jen like nothing but the click made by a piece of equipment that had just been switched on. It was a place of remembrance and worship for the Perkrish. Celebrating their victory over the Terran horde.

This is what Star City Nevada was: The Wal-Mart, and the Mountain. This is what Star City, Nevada, is: The Wal-mart, no Mountain.

The battle had been at a standstill. Humans had projectile-based weaponry and the Perkrish were like, fuck this, who even does this, what’s next, a sharpened stick? But the thing is they were also made of flesh so they were dropping like flies. So Command beamed them all out of there and beamed in an Eraser bomb. And just like that, Star City, Nevada, was a huge crater, mountain and all. Hole in the ground. Except for the Wal-Mart.

It was something in the way they built Wal-Marts, Jen had heard. They used some weird, toxic, probably illegal materials that were nevertheless cheap and sturdy. Humans didn’t know what the Perkrish Eraser bomb did, it wasn’t nuclear or anything, so nobody knows exactly how it happened. But the result was that where Star City used to be, there was a huge crater, with a shining crystal spire in the middle. The crystal spire was topped by the Wal-Mart, firmly in place like a star atop a Christmas tree.

Good riddance, thought Jen as she took another swig of tonic wine. She loved the stuff and should probably drink less of it, but it was so caffeinated it gave her the perfect cocktail of being buzzed and checked out that she needed for driving. Yesterday, a cop stopped her about this. She fluttered her eyelashes, and he said ‘Ms Jen Hanson, on account of you being a gorgeous piece of ass, I’ll let you go just this once’. Ugh. Men.

I mean, sexism had always been a thing and permutated in a lot of different ways, right? But the way it looked like now was this: it was much more overt and it seems to have regressed to, like, the 1940’s. And the reason for that was one heavy, disgusting syllable. Well, more complicated than that. It wasn’t just The Syllable. He was just convenient and the aliens were super invested in their divide-and-conquer thing, so they exacerbated shit that was already there. The Syllable was just convenient. Any other president could’ve done just as well, the aliens were just invested in ruthless efficiency. Which The Syllable was only capable of when it came to awful shit.

Fuck that, anyway. Jen H. was driving north and sort of east. Soon she’d be in Utah, but then she’d annoyingly have to drive around The Crater Formerly Known As Wyoming. America was like swiss cheese now. Jen H. hated cheese. Fuck the aliens.

The reality was that her, her friend and her cat had been trying to eke out a living in the west coast for a while, and it hadn’t worked out. Oh, she worked out her trans shit years ago. She transitioned, big whoop. But life there turned unsustainable when they stopped hiring women for shit, sex work wasn’t paying as well as before the new legislation was passed. So, Maria said, Canada. Maria often said a single word and expected everybody else to fill in the blanks afterward.

Jen H. trusted and distrusted Maria. Basically: Maria was a fuck-up and Jen H. knew it and so this is where their Obi-Wan/Luke, mentor-student relationship emerged. Maria was like yes I know I trained Darth Vader because I was inflexible in my Jedi past, and I’m trying to be more flexible but it’s hard when you accidentally trained the biggest genocidal monster in the history of the galaxy, but I still need to teach you the dark side is bad. And Jen was like, Tatooine looks like a much better time than Star City, so this metaphor falls apart, plus I’m my own princess who needs saving and whose home was destroyed by the evil Empire. Metaphors are hard, man.

And anyway, the aim was Winnipeg. A friend of theirs had read on one of the internets that there was a trans women’s collective there who’d take people in if they had shit to contribute. Maria knew Irish History, Jen H. knew retail, they were sure there were things they could do. Farming? Painting a house? Who knows, they’d figure it out. That wasn’t the hard part. The thing was, they were casting their lot with this information. Internets weren’t a reliable source of information anymore, by virtue of being localised, like back in the BBS days. Except it was now physically impossible to connect to anything that wasn’t in your vicinity. Social media, and all the money made from it, evaporated after the Perkrish saw it as much too likely to be used to organise resistance against them. So, social media was banned, the Internet was broken into tiny, manageable pieces, and all the social media people were out of a job overnight. There’s a homeless man in San Francisco who acts like an entitled little prick, cos he used to run one of these businesses. Every time he meets someone, he asks their name. If he doesn’t like it, he yells at them, through a scraggly brown beard, demanding to know their real name as it is in their documentation. Which is irrelevant because nobody carries their ID with them anymore, it’s kept by their Alien supervisors at their place of work. Anyway.

Winnipeg, then. Jen had never been to Canada. She craved maple syrup, so she took a swig of the sugary, thick tonic wine in the flask. This shit was her fuel, and she was a hot rod down the liminal highway.


	2. Still Flattember, Maria G., Still Interstate 80

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's happening in the back of the car? Maria sleeps on a horrid tweed car seat, wakes up and meditates on her life. Turns out her life still sucks.

Maria hadn’t been able to sleep in the backseat for hours. She hated that. She hated this stupid car and she couldn’t decide if she hated Jen H. sometimes, even though sometimes she hugged her and loved the shit out of her like a proud older sister would.

But this car, man, it was fucking awful. Peugeot 504, dirt-beige, with seats made of… tweed? That’s the closest Maria could find to describe the horrid, irritating texture that was right now pressed against her face as she laid down trying to sleep, and failing. Who the fuck puts something like tweed in a car? She wondered if it’d been the dude who sold Jen H. the car. He was an old dude with a big beard and a very strong Italian accent, though he claimed he was Argentinian. This checked out, the car itself was an Argentinian make. How the fuck did it make it to the United States of America in these post-alien-invasion times? Fuck knows, thought Maria. Fuck is a very knowledgable concept. I’m sure it knows.

Now she was strategizing: sit up and try to chat with Jen? Jen always had shit to talk about. She’d blossomed. It was beautiful. Maria hated it and loved it. See, Jen saw herself as this fuck-up. This absolute mess of a woman, and in terms of ‘how fucked up is this individual’, yeah, she was, sorta? But for a trans girl who transitioned under the watchful eye of Alien America, where patriarchy had somehow, inexplicably, become even worse, she was pretty sorted out. She was excited about community art projects. She’d made friends. She had had a couple of girlfriends, a bunch of wild sex parties, published a zine, and a buncha other DIY tranpunk stuff Maria wished she’d done more of. Except Maria was Officially Old Now.

See the thing is queer communities have an age limit and apparently even after the apocalypse nobody thought this was limiting who could contribute to the communities. Which you’d think would be important at a time when aliens were literally trying to conquer the fucking planet. But whatever: people have an amazing capacity to prioritize themselves and their boners, and nobody wants to fuck an old person aside from other old people. And they’re too stressed out trying to survive or raise the kids they sometimes wish they hadn’t had because they were raising them in the Alien States of America and that was so sad it sometimes made Maria want to tear her hair out one follicle at a fucking time.

She casts her lot with getting up, because the tweed-like pattern in her face is making it all red and bumpy. She runs a finger down her cheek, skin is so weird she thinks. She takes a deep breath, looks out the window at the endless fields passing by the window and asks hey, where are we? Jen H. goes oh! Well, we just passed the exit to Star City. Maria goes no fucking way. Jen smiles and goes yes fucking way. Maria says that’s not funny. Because: it isn’t. Because: a lot of people fucking died including your goddamn parents, Jen, and it was just your luck you’d moved to the bay and Nicole had moved to Portland that you fucking survived. Have some goddamn respect, maybe? That’s what Maria would like to say. She doesn’t say anything.

Jen H goes yeah, I miss mom. But it’s like I don’t get to mourn by myself, I’m mourning with Humanity or whatever, cos that’s where they fought us back? Or maybe you were too busy getting a dildo up your ass in a secret dungeon while your parents were fucking dying of Erasure (the bomb effect, not the band). Maybe you were too busy doing all the fun shit I didn’t get to do because when I was coming out even when we were trans punks and anarchists and queers and feminists we were still goddamn trans women in this fucking world and felt that shame was, like, part of the outfit. Doesn’t really come together otherwise.

It’s not like Maria’s time in the bay had been an absolute waste of time. She was mentoring young queer kids. They sent her the tough cases, usually kids who had seen a bit too much of the old Earth Fighting Against Evil Aliens stuff. She had a vegetable plot, and she did little bits and bobs for cash around the place. But all of that was drying up now that the west coast was officially joining the Alien States. But Winnipeg? She knew a girl in Winnipeg once, who had a Winnebago and didn’t see what was funny about it. Internet people were weird circa 2004.

And like, Maria tries to have hope. It’s just that she was searching for herself and all of a sudden, survival fucking mode happened. And she grew her tomatoes and she told the kids things would work out and to hold each other up rather than hang on to destructive models of community which only discarded people like they were toilet paper. Sometimes she believed there was hope too.

It was hard to have hope, when anarchists had pretty much given up the ghost, and all political parties merged into the Alien Party with eternal president, The Syllable. The Syllable was never going to become president otherwise. He was a mad dude with a lot of money and an inexplicably cheap toupee, with ridiculous ideas about everything and a campaign that looked more like performance art than all the already ridiculous circus that was Presidential campaigning in general.

The bottom line is that he betrayed humanity so extremely that his name is now considered an omen of bad luck. People now rig their televisions so that when his name shows up or someone says it, it gets obscured and bleeped. Because that one-syllable name is almost too much to contemplate to the defeated people of America. Last week, playing around with Piranha’s chainsaw, Maria fucked up a chunk of wood with it while yelling FUCK TRUMP! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK TRUMP!

The neighbour’s kid heard and his dad came over to have some Stern Words. Maria couldn’t look him in the eye, because just saying that name was upsetting enough, now she had to do something everybody had trained her for, continuously, all her life: apologise for her feelings. 

The thing is, Maria is kind of sad all the time now and only lets it out when Piranha lets her play with her building equipment and smash shit up, or when she’s in the ring. Otherwise she’s just pent-up, non-confrontational. She’ll take her feelings to her grave. Fuck feelings.


End file.
